Maybe in absolute terms, given the expansion of the total size of the economy through history, but I can't imagine that the proportion of Italy's population that was able to sustain a middle class existence through artisanship was lower in the Renaissance than it is today.

In the Renaissance, artisanship was an economic necessity and a political system. Nowadays it's a weird meeing of supply-and-demand between the elites among the buyers and the elites among the sellers. Only the elites among the buyers can afford to buy goods that have been produced in a less economical way than functionally/aesthetically equivalent alternatives, just for the bragging rights connected with filling one's home with handmade stuff. Only the elites among the sellers can withstand the competition among those wanting to be such sellers.

Obviously those elites' point of view shouldn't be the only one informing the decisions about how we, as a society, want to relate to technology.